Final Filtering

[Eric Shumaker]

Last night I boiled down my last reduced syrup to about 6.5F above water boil. Water was boiling at 210.7 I took it up to about 217.0 - 217.2. I had just under 5 1/2 gallons of near-syrup (from 250 gallons of sap) that I ran through flat pre & final filters to remove quite a bit of sugar sand. I plan to finish on the stove in the house tonight and bottle.

My question: Should I run the syrup through the filters again tonight after I bring it to temperature, or did running the near-syrup through the filters last night finalize the filtering requirement.

thanks in advance for your responses.

[Run Forest Run!]

Hi Eric. Welcome.

You'll need to filter again once your syrup is done boiling, however the prefiltering that you did will really have helped to eliminate a lot of niter. Post some pictures when you are done! :)

[Mike Van]

Eric - Just my 2 cents here, every time you filter, you're loosing more & more of your product - One time just before it goes into the bottles always seemed to me to be the best. Every time you bring it to a boil, it releases more & more sugar sand. Also, hope you are finishing with a hydrometer, it's the most accurate.

[Eric Shumaker]

yes. I also have a hydrometer. thank you for your input.

[Eric Shumaker]

Thank you Forest for your input. i'll try and get the pics up.

[Dpostman]

We also filter in 2 stages. We filter through a cone pre-filter without using the Orlon filter when we draw off. Usually about a gallon of slightly dense syrup when we draw off. The pre-filter has no problem handling that and very little loss. We use a fresh one every time we draw off. After the boiling is done and our last draw off for the day is done, we let the "Pre-filtered" syrup sit overnight in a large stock pot. The next day, we bring to boil and adjust the density, filter through a cone filter with 3 or 4 pre-filters in it into a coffee urn and bottle from that. Most of the time we only bottle about 2 gallons. 2 weekends ago we bottled 6 gallons... that was a longer bottling day as filtering was getting slow. This is only our 3rd season making syrup, but thanks to this forum and the internet, we've improved our technique and reduced our work load substantially. Gonna look into that Cone Filter Optimizer for next season.

Just taking the opportunity to thank you all for the info (Thread hijacking not intended ;) )

dp

[DaveB]

I generally filter my syrup once. I take my syrup off the evaporator straight into 5 gallon containers, unfiltered. This allows me to grade & date/time my batches. At the end of the season I'm usually busy with clean-up for a few weeks but once that is done I carefully pour the syrup to heat it up but careful to leave the bottom gallon or so in the container. By this time everything is usually settled out and I find that I can filter it hot through the filter on a canning unit using the bypass on my filter press. I then take the remaining gunk in the bottom of all the 5 gallon containers and heat that up and run that though my filter press.